Providing Support in an Online World
10 Oct 2016
Online tools and the internet in general have made our working lives so much easier than they used to be. I often wonder how on earth I used to be able to get things done before the advent of the search engine, email, user forums etc.
The fact is that it was often impossible to do certain tasks without either spending a large amount of time or a large amount of money (or both). If you needed to do something new the chances are that you would either have to employ the services of a specialist company to do it, spend time and money attending training courses and purchasing software, or spend a lot of time learning from text books (if any were available).
Today you can simply enter some search terms into Google and immediately have access either to a tool which will let you perform the task, a plethora of information on how to do it, or links to companies who can do it for you.
Online tools have made the creation of direct mail marketing campaigns available to companies of all sizes - they let you very quickly and easily create professional marketing campaigns which until very recently would have been impossible to do without employing the services of marketing agencies and mailing houses. Even if you did use a marketing agency what do you think the response would have been if you said to them "I need a new campaign creating and it needs to mail tomorrow"?
But just because you are using an online tool that shouldn't mean that you are left to work things out for yourself. Of course we expect there to be comprehensive online help such as FAQs, tutorials, videos etc. however that is often not enough. When creating direct mail campaigns online users need support more than ever as not only may they need help using the tool itself but they may not have much experience of direct mail in general. Users are far more likely to use an online tool if they know that there is a team of direct mail experts available to help them and guide them whether that be via phone, live chat, email, or user forums.
Online tools have made marketing services available to a huge amount of companies who couldn't previously afford such services but simply providing the service online is not good enough - customers still need a helping hand and need to know that expert help is available when required.
Richard Knaggs
Please login to comment.
Comments